Since 2005 ESO has been working with its community and industry to develop an extremely large optical/infrared telescopes.

Dubbed E-ELT for European Extremely Large Telescope, this revolutionary new ground-based telescope concept will have a 39-metre main mirror and will be the largest optical/near-infrared telescope in the world: “the world’s biggest eye on the sky”.

The E-ELT programme was approved in 2012 and green light for construction was given at the end of 2014. First light is expected in 2024.

Did you know?Stars form in dense clouds of the interstellar medium, but even in these densest regions the pressure is comparable to the most tenuous vacuum created in a laboratory on Earth. In these clouds, the temperatures are below -200 degrees Celsius.

Did you know?The E-ELT will gather 100 000 000 times more light than the human eye, 8 000 000 times more than Galileo's telescope, and 26 times more than a single VLT Unit Telescope. In fact, the E-ELT will gather more light than all of the existing 8–10-metre class telescopes on the planet, combined.